We've been slammed for the last few weeks at the KnockingItDownCompany*, and I've found myself on the radio with a call holding and backed-up emails and faxes wanting to be sent, from the time I get there in the morning until I tear myself away with things undone at the end of the day. I'm guessing that means we're going through another growth spurt.
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I've also spent the last few weekends and quite a few week nights focused on the needs of my little online marketing client. They're a small niche packaged goods company, offering a seasonal product and we're getting ready for the 2007 season. I'm setting up a blog for them and researching and identifying targets for direct marketing efforts. It's fun, but it's cut into my social life, or what was left of it, since my best friend has taken to spending the weekends at The Farm (her fine newly purchased toy, horses included). I've been invited up to her new north Georgia home, but haven't managed to go yet. It might be hard to leave.
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Fall baseball is underway and I'm keenly aware of all the things we're doing for the last time, at least in this community. I try not to think too far ahead, because it's not likely that The Youngest will play college baseball. He would have to want it. I do like his coach though. A group of us wanted to play together and the league hooked us up with a coach whose fifteen year old son was just aging into the "upper league". It's wooked out really well, and Coach has been very inclusive of me, very respectful of the fact that I'm used to coaching my son. He's invited me into the dugout, consulted me regularly prior to and during games, about strategic decisions, particularly those related to pitching. He didn't have to do that and I appreciate it. It feels wonderful to be out there in the cooling weather watching The Youngest savoring this time. He is playing with real joy (and killing the baseball).
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I saw Oprah and Friends last night on Larry King Live (yes, I was home watching television on a Saturday night, but the activity included cooking a fabulous oven roast with pot roast style veggies prepared on the side - yuuummmm), and I was struck by her ambitious venture. It's her television show's regular guests, each with their own radio show, presenting talk about decorating, money, relationships, fitness, health, spirituality and whatever Dr. Maya Angelou is going to talk about ("life lessons and laughs"), all delivered shame-free, which I've decided is the core theme to Oprah's message. It's not a bad theme. It took me decades of therapy (not to mention the small fortune it cost), a disastrous marriage and most of my life to finally "get" how destructive shame is, the differences between guilt and shame, and how one helps us but the other eats at us from the inside and ruins our relationships. Now it's free for everyone on XM Radio's Channel 156.
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The new issue of Line Up Magazine is hitting the streets, that venerable resource for all things board: surf, skate, snow and sail; also offering a peek into what's new in alternative music and just how small bikinis can get. This, their ninth issue, is Pirate themed, and includes a particular article (having, btw, absolutely nothing to do with Pirates), which Middle Son and I wrote during my last visit to New Orleans, focusing on the post Katrina experiences of the owners of the New Orleans Surf Shop. It should be available in surf, skate, snow and sail board shops nationwide this week (NO Surf should get their issues on Monday 10/2). Subscriptions are available online at LineUpTheMag.
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I participated in a Bloomberg-Los Angeles Times Poll recently. If you click the link entitled "(9/21/2006) Bush, Foreign Affairs, Midterm Elections" it will offer you a PDF of the poll's results. They picked the house phone number randomly, I answered the phone and happened to be the adult in the household with the most recent birthday. It felt good to be able to speak my mind on these matters and think somehow it would be heard. They called as I was getting ready to leave for a baseball game and I almost didn't answer the "out of area" call. Clearly, I'm no expert, but I am a citizen and a voter. I went to college and studied government. I spent two semesters in an independent honors study of our country's involvement in Vietnam, and I can't help but see one searing similarity between our country's involvement there and in Iraq. Our brave soldiers will fight, primarily for each other, until they die or are finally able to return home to their families, but those who are fighting us will fight until they die or win. So many so much smarter than I am can't see a positive way for this to resolve. I can't even imagine one. I do think that we'll keep soldiers there as long as there are so many Americans busily and profitably engaged in the "rebuilding" of that which we destroyed.
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My blog friend, Paula, wrote a particularly beautiful post yesterday, This, too, shall pass about treating sadness over loss with nature and beauty and the contemplation of our place in the great scheme of things. She talked of her thoughts while walking through a long open field, towards the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and "how insignificant our pain, our moment, our lives were in the context of geological time." She added, and commenters agreed, that this feeling is also strong when we're at the edge of the ocean. I think it's when we juxtapose ourselves with the natural world, so it comes to me at the beach or in the southeast's forested mountains, so small compared to the great Rockies, but so protectively safe feeling to me. I must get up to my best friend's farm soon. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with the urban rendition thereof, with young men playing baseball on crisp fall nights, living in our little apartment treehouse and taking long, slow walks with the old blind dog (see picture, above).
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I promise to try hard to catch up on all the fine blogs I've been missing these last few weeks and I hope you are all well and happy and fed and loved. Peace, out, ya'll.
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*Edit: I shall hereinafter refer to my place of employment as the KnockingItDownCompany. This is not because I've sworn off swearing, because I haven't, I swear. It came to me in the shower this morning, with all the other brilliant thoughts I immediately forget. There is a great deal of gallows humour in this business and we knock a lot of shit down. I have no idea if we'll ever go to New Orleans to participate in what very well might end up being the largest single demolition project our country has ever seen but there is something hallowed about that particular demolition, and out of respect for that, I will stop calling it the KnockingShitDownCompany. *sigh*
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